The Writer-s Diet

This bestselling handbook will highlight your bad writing habits and sharpen your style for clearer, crisper sentences and punchier prose. The Writers Diet offers a short, sharp introduction to great writing. Through the online test at www.writersdiet.com and the analysis and examples in this book, Helen Sword teaches writers of all kinds, students to teachers, lawyers to librarians, how to transform flabby sentences into active, energetic prose. The book and the website enable writers to diagnose their writing for flab passives and prepositions, weak verbs and waste words, and energise their work by stripping away unnecessary padding. The rules of good writing are deceptively simple but this book helps writers to see those principles at work, through examples by stylish authors from Charles Dickens to John McPhee. First published in 2007, The Writers Diet became a bestselling handbook and now returns refreshed alongside a new version of www.writersdiet.com. The book will highlight your bad habits and sharpen your style for clearer, crisper sentences filled with words that count.

About the author:

Professor Helen Sword is a literary scholar and director of the Centre for Learning and Research in Higher Education at the University of Auckland. She is the author most recently of Stylish Academic Writing (Harvard University Press, 2012).